Hi all, some background info
Just started a new job travelling around several sites with one as a base, installed suse 9.3 on an acer travelmate every thing working including wireless link to my home network. its only a small company with no onsite IT staff MD has said use whatever I like but company networks are all XP and I need to acess email, printers and files, contract IT are no help.
While I have been playing with linux since suse 6.4 not in a work based mixed network environment so can anyone tell me where to find an easy guide to joining a windows network/exchange server and what questions to ask the IT guys.
regards
John

You need SAMBA, but as that is as far as I can tell you. Sorry!
It is already installed with SuSE 9.3, IIRC, you need to go into YaST and select Network.
But also check out the SAMBA home page as well, for more info.

Samba will get the access to files and printers - if the permissions allow it.

You need to get the IT guys to confirm that TCP/IP is the primary protocol for networking, and that they aren't blocking access from wherever you will be connecting.

For email on Exchange Server, I think you need to find about whether they support IMAP or VPOP3, and then you can pick your mail client
- for this sort of thing the pcplus forums are probably a better bet (I've seen the topic come up there before)
http://forum.pcplus.co.uk/

A quick update configured samba client with yast and after extracting the gateway passkey from one of the guys I can get on to the wireless network and even ping the server on 192.168.0.1 if i use that address in a browser I get a MS Small Business server homepage with 3 or 4 options but do not get a login pagebox so I am temporarily stuck
John

It appears that web access to MS SBS is not enabled - using Evolution or Kontact (being Suse the Exchange connector plugin is part of their setup) you can connect to an Exchange Server. You should be able to open the accounts section and setup a new mail account. Don't forget that you want to leave the emails on the server (IMPORTANT!!) or you will have some of your e-mails on the laptop and some on the server. The login details should be the same as the network access account. Look in the User Guide for more detail, by default it is in:

Another update with the aid of the workgroup name I can now see all of the pc's/servers on the network still can't access the shares but getting there. Got Evolution working with the exchange server all fully functioning including free/busy calendar

I too am having problems with shares under Samba (using a new install of Suse 9.3)...can see the drives of my wife's Windows ME machine, but can't view the files on the drives. Any take on this from anyone else??

If your network is Domain Controlled by windows ... you will need to configure your samba.conf file and your krb5.conf files with appropriate domain/realm info. then at the command prompt (as the user you want to join as) type

I'm surprised that Suse 9.3 would NOT be "preconfigured", in some way, to recognize and support a Windows network (or Windows machines on a LAN, if there's a difference). My "OLD" copy of Mandrake handled all this pretty transparently (I was STUNNED, at the time!!). In any case, is there a way of doing this from GNOME or KDE, without resorting to the command line or manually editing configuration files?
Thanks for the help, youlikeicecream.

Final update all now working ok, most of my problems have been caused by the IT support company employing M$ blinded idiots the final stage was simply needing the domain and user names but according to them there wasn't a domain name!! because no one had entered one so after a bit of snooping with ethereal found the domain name and guessed my username Leif I used SWAT to configure samba but it is not enabled by default so you need to use yast and Network Services xinetd to enable it and in System Services - Runlevel Editor enable smb and nmb the point your browser at localhost:901